


The One Who Will Watch

by Areiton



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Angst, Castiel-centric, Domestic, Established Relationship, Everyone is Dead, Far Future, M/M, Mark of Cain, Sam is dead, Sorta coda?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-19
Updated: 2016-11-19
Packaged: 2018-08-31 22:38:34
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,443
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8596504
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Areiton/pseuds/Areiton
Summary: I once thought dying for him would be the hardest thing.I was wrong.It was staying with him.





	

I once thought dying for him. Falling for him. Would be the hardest thing I would ever be asked to do for Dean Winchester.

I was wrong.

***

 

I told him I would be here.

I meant it.

Sometimes, I see him watching me, as if wondering _if_ I am still here. _Why_ I am still here. If I regret it.

I don't.

There were the bloody years, right after Sam died. When Dean let the Mark have it's way, and carved a swath of death through the countryside, and I followed him. I knew when it was over, when his unfathomable grief ran it's course, there would be guilt and regret.

Claire left us, then. She couldn't bear to see him like that, couldn't bear to see him stand without Sam at his side. She sobbed when she drove away, and it broke my heart to see her go. To see the girl I had known as a child, now grown and old and deserting us, finally.

I wanted to hate her, for leaving.

I wanted to go with her too much to ever hate her.

But even Dean's rage and grief ran dry. It took a century, and he tore a path through Heaven and Hell and earth. There were times when I thought he would do it, he would burn the world down with his grief. But in the end it ran it's course and he looked at me, one day, over the shell of a dead demon and said simply, **_I want to go home._**

***

 

I took him back to the place he was happiest. The place where it all went wrong and all went right.

I took him to the bunker, with its million memories and stores of knowledge, with it's wards and protections and it's warm sense of _home_.

And we stayed there. For a long time, after we first returned, he wandered the halls and settled in a deep melancholy. A depression that I knew would follow the death, as he grieved Sam and wrestled with his own actions.

He was, still, so similar to the man I pulled from hell, and yet he was worn through with guilt and the weight of years, and the blood that stained his hands.

***

 

Once, I thought the rack and what he did there would be the worst guilt he would carry.

Once, I thought purgatory was the worst hell either of would have to endure.

But this is different. This is guilt he cannot escape, and this home that we have chosen is it’s own special brand of hell.

I worried for him.

He was Dean and I was me, and to worry and wonder was in my nature.

He suffered nightmares. Not even the Mark could banish them and I would find myself, drawn to his troubled dreams, and use the Grace that still flickered in my vessel to soothe them.

Sometimes, he dreamt of Sam.

Those were good nights, inevitably followed by morose days.

I stayed close to him, then, lingering in the kitchen while Dean cooked and the garage while he tinkered with the Impala that no longer ran but he refused to give up. In the bedroom, where he read on a small digital screen and fell asleep on my shoulder.

***

 

It was rare that he reached for me.

Rare that he let himself find comfort against me. Controlling the Mark meant, so often, a life of denial.

Denial of alcohol and sex and the hunts that gave him so much purpose.

He seemed lost, without it.

But sometimes. Sometimes he reached for me and I revealed in those moments, when he breathed my name like a prayer and he held me like I was important. When he kissed me like I was precious and moved against me in a relentless wave, and slumped, happy for a heartbeat, against my side, his breath a warm puff of air against my neck as I came in him, and found myself again.

It never lasted, but I treasured those stolen moments.

***

 

The world turned and the years passed and we found a way to live. A way to bear the Mark and not lose him. The world changed, outside the bunker. Technology and wars and fear changed it. People read their books and the name Winchester was spoken, whispered soft and reverent. Passed from one generation to the next, tales of how they saved the world and how the world broke them.

They became that thing I never expected them to see: appreciated.

Sometimes, when we ventured out of the bunker, we heard them and his eyes would go flat and dangerous, the Mark tugging at him, before he smiled with thin amusement.

**_What do you think they'd say about this?_** He'd ask, gesturing at the brand on his arm.

I hated it.

I hated it was familiar now.

I hated it for what it made him.

Sometimes, I hated it so much that it bled into him, and I would be dizzy with anger and grief, that he had become this thing.

***

 

My family saw me, occasionally.

Angels walked the earth, even after Heaven was reopened. As long as I have walked at Dean's side, to see them is inevitable. We are confronted by them on the rare occasions we hunt, and when the world demands a savior and he reluctantly takes up that role again.

We watch them shape the world and politics and I try very hard to not be bitter.

I wonder, sometimes, if the Morningstar is laughing in his Cage.

They stop asking me to return, after the second century.

I miss it sometimes. I miss feeling like they care, and like I still belong there.

I don’t. I haven’t belonged in heaven in centuries, not since I first stepped into that barn and saw him, green glass eyes wide and determined and afraid.

Dean, though, never stops asking.

**_Do you miss it?_** [No]

**_You could see Sam, if you go home._** [I am home]

**_You don't have to stay._** [I chose to stay]

**_They miss you._** [No]

**_They're your family._** [You are my family]

**_Castiel. You don't need to stay._** [Dean. I won’t leave you]

It becomes a familiar liturgy, a call and response that is as frustrating as it is comforting.

He never asks me why anymore.

There is no need.

***

 

 

When we are naked and in bed, and he thinks I am sleeping, he sometimes whispers, voice so low it is almost silence, a plea he is ashamed to make and unable to stop.

**_Don’t leave me. Don’t ever leave me._ **

I never do.

***

We adopt a cat and then another, and a dog that makes him cry, before he let's it crawl into our bed. After a time, it becomes familiar, having a pair of dogs and a slow blinking cat, and fur that clings to everything and small happy bodies that trip me when I reach for coffee in the morning.

We have an apiary, and a small garden. He even watches me, some days, when I sit in them and pull weeds.

We have a garage that houses Baby, even now, and a library where he goes when he needs to feel Sam, because even though centuries have passed, that is a hole that will never be filled, a grief that will never stop aching.

We live a quiet life.

We are, if not happy, content. And some days, we are happy.

***

 

Occasionally Crowley will come calling. I always expect to hear he has been killed, but it hasn't happened yet and maybe it never will. Stranger things have happened.

He always comes begging a favor and Dean always turns him down. After, he will go dark and brooding, will sit for hours in silent stillness. And he will kill.

Every time, he will come to me, blood stained and eyes flickering black and green,  and watch me with that familiar angry hesitance. And I will take his hand, lead him to the bathroom and wash him clean.

Take him to bed and kiss away his fear.

***

 

He is a killer but he has always been one, and that has never scared me in him.

He is dark and I am light and together we create the beautiful shadows where we dwell.

He is eternal and unchanging and one day I will lose him entirely, lose him to the hum of power in his veins.

But I stay at his side, the place that I have always claimed as my home, and I watch. As I swore to do. As I chose, daily, forever, to do.

 

**Author's Note:**

> In S10, ep 22, Castiel tells Dean that he'll be the one who will watch Dean murder the world.  
> That line has never quite left me. The depth of what Cas is promising--that he will never leave Dean, even when Dean is under the influence of the Mark, speaks more strongly of his love for Dean than dying ever did.


End file.
